The upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel drops SGI's EFS and the Veritas freevxfs driver, ditching thousands of lines of legacy code.
(http://iili.io/CLKvWeR.png)
Credit: Larry Ewing
We just had the final release of Linux 7.2, meaning that developers have started turning their attention to new features, and old feature removals, for the upcoming Linux 7.3. We are only on the second day of the merge windows but already two older file systems have been axed from the kernel; they are Silicon Graphics’ (SGI) IRIX Extent File System (EFS) and the Veritas VxFS-compatible freevxfs driver.
Both changes were submitted by maintainer Christian Brauner and contributor Christoph Hellwig. A combined 3,724 lines of code across 33 files were stripped out as a result. One amazing detail shared in the pull requests was that freevxfs only had one contributor or user in the last 15 years and was being used as a target for automated bug fuzzers.
When Linux 7.3 is finally available and users begin using it, it will be unable to natively mount raw EFS disks or old Veritas file systems. Both file systems are ancient by technological measures, here is a bit of history about EFS from Higher Intellect Vintage Wiki:
“EFS was introduced in March of 1986 with GL2-W2.4 to replace the System V/Bell file system created by AT&T. EFS was deprecated in favor of XFS beginning with the introduction of IRIX 5.3 XFS in December of 1994 and later IRIX 6.0.1 XFS in March of 1995 with all subsequent versions of IRIX using XFS.”
Meanwhile, freevxfs allowed Linux to read the Veritas File System (VxFS) which was used by enterprise operating systems such as HP-UX and SCO UnixWare. Having the driver in Linux was useful in the past because it allowed admins to salvage or read data from legacy commercial Unix systems using Veritas file formats, without having to depend upon proprietary drivers. Given that both of these operating systems are from the 1980s and 1990s, there is little need for the freevxfs driver anymore, so it has been phased out, eliminating any potential security holes they contained.
If for some reason you’re an admin who needs support for these ancient file systems, then you can continue using old LTS kernels while the are supported, but after that, support will be gone entirely.
source (http://www.neowin.net/news/linux-73-merge-window-kicks-off-by-throwing-out-two-ancient-file-systems/)